Snapchat now has more than 60 million daily active users in the U.S. And Canada.
Imran Khan, the company’s chief strategy officer, publicized the number during the annual Advertising Week conference in New York City on Monday, as Bloomberg reported and Snapchat later confirmed to Coins2Day. This market represents about 40% of the ephemeral messaging app’s 150 million daily active users worldwide. About 50 million of them are in Europe, the company revealed earlier this month.
Snapchat, founded in 2011, began as an app for sharing photos an videos that disappear after the recipient has viewed them. It was a response to the growing anxiety from teens and young adults concerned that permanent social media services like Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR) could haunt them later in life.
Since then, Snapchat has added Discover, a section in the app where users can peruse bite-sized news articles and other content from publishers, as well as various advertising products as part of its plans to become a veritable media company.
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In February, the company revealed that its users spend on average 25 to 30 minutes on the app, a metric that’s important for Snapchat. Last year, co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said that internally, his company is more focused on this metric than daily active users.
At the moment, Snapchat’s daily active users in the U.S. And Canada are just over one third of Facebook’s, which has 175 million in the same region. And while Facebook’s European user base is bigger (it has 252 million daily active users in Europe), it gets more average revenue per user from advertising in the U.S. And Canada ($13.74) than it does in Europe ($3.71).
According to a leaked pitch deck, Snapchat was projecting to bring in about $250 million and $350 million in revenue for 2016, and as much as $1 billion for 2017.
Last week, the company announced a new corporate name—Snap, Inc.—as it prepares to debut its second product, a pair of sunglasses with a small camera that captures 10-second videos for sharing on Snapchat.
The story has been updated with data about the average time users spend on the app daily.